


Poisons

by CorpseBrigadier



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Angst, Double Drabble, Drabble Sequence, Embedded Images, Gen, Poison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-01-26 19:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21379147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Fourteen vignettes regarding Sabin, his relationships to others, and the ways in which they are affected by him in life or in death.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 24
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Poisons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phlyarologist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/gifts).

> The dual narrative is based on a [1994 interview](http://shmuplations.com/ff6/) with Hironobu Sakaguchi, who revealed that "During the development, for the Tzen event in the World of Ruin, originally if the time ran out, Sabin would actually die! [...] but we decided that the World of Ruin already had more than enough dark stories, and changed it for the final version of the game." 
> 
> The italicized shorts that include botanical and animal poisons (yew, Jerusalem cherries, amanitas, scorpions, foxglove, oleander, atropa) follow a continuity in which Sabin dies at Tzen; the non-italicized shorts that include potentially toxic minerals (arsenic, coal, silica, ash, lead, mercury, salt) track the original continuity of the game.

_“Hey, could you knock it off?” Sabin asked, watching as Shadow coated the edge of one of his shuriken with a thin veneer of dark liquid. “Poison’s not something we want on our minds now.”_

_“Sir Sabin,” Cyan said softy. “If the man must prepare weapons in readiness for battle...”_

_“It’s not poison, you know—not in the same way,” Shadow brusquely interjected. “It’s a venom. You’d be fine drinking a whole bottle.”_

_He nicked the edge of his finger with a knife and let a few drops fell onto the edge of a metal star, coagulating into lumpish beads of red._

_“Attacks via the blood, not the stomach.”_

_Sabin shot him a very pointed glare as Cyan quietly folded his face into his hands. Before anyone could say anything more, he grabbed the little glass container from out of Shadow’s grasp and downed it in a long gulp. Even behind the mask, the astonishment in the man’s widening, dark eyes was apparent._

_The dog that had lain motionless in Shadow’s lap gave a confused whine as Sabin tossed the bottle behind him into the brush, where it rattled amidst the skeletal branches of a long dead yew before falling silent._

They seemed like ghosts themselves walking the long path into the light, the reflex of the sun occasionally visible on the two metal tracks that snaked off into the forest.

“I’m sorry, you know…” Sabin said, fidgeting with his hair tie.

“Thou hast no need to apologize, Sir Sabin.”

“I should’ve run after it.” He flexed his knuckles; his voice deathly serious in its determination.

Cyan, although he had surely not laughed in days, did so now, beset as he was with the image of this young man rushing off the edge of the world to wrestle Doma’s dead back to him.

“What’s so funny?”

Convulsing with more laughter than the situation could possibly warrant, he doubled over, fresh tears running down his cheeks as his guffaws became indistinguishable from sobbing.

“Y-you okay? Can I get you something? Drink of water, maybe?” Sabin fumbled about his possessions, recalling that he had no water on hand. “I stole a cruller from the dining car,” he offered at last, plunging his hand into a pocket.

As he withdrew it, a fistful of moth-wing grey powder ran through his fingertips. It floated in the air like ash, thick with the scent of almonds.

_“How dost thou… how dost thou perform as an animal with a body other than thine own?”_

_Gau cocked his head and flung an arm over it, looking quizzical as he scratched his neck._

_“I think he means uh… how do you manage something like an osprey’s dive without any wings? …or say you want to be a wererat, and…”_

_Gau grinned until the sharp points of his eye-teeth were visible, and he fumbled about until he produced a ragged bundle of fur—the animal head of some discarded toy or talisman. He darted his hand in and withdrew it—five red berries impaled on each of his sharp fingernails._

_Sabin didn’t have time to think as the boy somersaulted through the air with a triumphant yawp. He just moved, dancelike, catching and folding Gau’s outstretched arm to bring him whirling back to the ground._

_“Jeez! You didn’t have to show me!” Sabin shouted, landing on the grass next to him. Gau, once the air was back in his lungs, laughed with the abandon of a toddler who had been flung into a nest of cushions._

_“Again!” he cried “Gau will be osprey this time if you throw him again!”_

Both of them were obviously out of place in the Narshe, given what they were—or rather weren’t—wearing. Sabin watched as Gau bounded and pounced his way through the snow, unflustered. He worried that without a decade’s worth of training in ice springs and over hot coals, the kid was going to catch a cold.

Cyan placed a hand on his bare shoulder before he could call out, gesturing to a fallen bird that lay still outside one of the smokestacks on the roof below them.

“It looks wrong, dost it not?

“Yeah.” He furrowed his brow, the cold whipping numbly across his half-exposed chest. “Poor thing.”

“They doth always look wrong when they hath died. A bird only seems a bird in motion.”

He looked hesitantly to where Gau wheeled within the drift. Sabin thought to his father, moving so subtly and slowly from sleep to death that it had been hours before they knew. He nodded nevertheless, steadying Cyan’s arm as Gau gave out the shriek of delight that his breath could take visible shape in the biting air. 

They both tensed without shivering. He knew the stillness of old men was different than that of children.

_“The Empire has at least one good chef in it, even if I can’t endorse their choice of employers,” Setzer said, spooning an ornate amuse bouche into his mouth with aplomb. “We should remember this moment lest a future peace disturb whatever exploitation and ill use provided for it.”_

_Sabin watched as Edgar drummed his fingers pensively, pushing about mushrooms and mollusks on his plate without eating. He said nothing, just as Edgar said nothing about his own untouched spread of something done up in squid-ink and golf leaf._

_His stomach groaned in protest at his principles. He wanted to eat anything—even whatever this was—but the situation called for solidarity. If he had to waste away to skin and bone here in Vector, so be it._

_“I don’t think it’s so great,” he said at a point when the moment had passed and Setzer was engaged with some manner of kebab._

_“Would it kill you to taste it first?” he retorted blithely._

_Before he could bring down his fist against the table, he felt his brother’s hand on his own. He held it very tightly and focused on the rhythm of his breath. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Repeat._

“I was naïve back then. I remember thinking it might’ve been something in the sand, ya know,” Sabin said, watching the vast sea of pale gold upon which the Blackjack cast its shadow. “I’d hear the machinists say it gets into the lungs—messes with your insides.”

“There wouldn’t be very many Figaros if sand was what killed us.”

“There _aren’t_ many Figaros though.”

Edgar suddenly fell silent and looked up towards the sky, the rush of wind flapping his hair about like a kite tail. Sabin felt like he’d said something very wrong—perhaps a number of somethings.

“Hey,” he said apologetically, throwing an arm around his brother to trap him in half a bear hug. “We can talk about something else.”

“It’s fine—it’s fine—” Edgar laughed. “The whole situation makes for some heavy thoughts after all.”

He smiled, interweaving his own arm with Sabin’s as the dark shape of an unmoored island grew larger and larger above the horizon. The light of the sinking sun divided itself along its edge, forming two blazing bands of red and orange.

“Besides, even if there were no Figaros,” he continued softly, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

_He would have tried to hold up the whole of the world if somebody’d asked. This was only a little house, and really, a scorpion was only a little creature (at least it should be.)_

_When you broke down the basic elements like that—world, house, scorpion—it seemed the stuff of fable. His mind drifted to a rust-colored book Edgar had once stolen from the library, where the first letter on the first page was very big and the second page was a full color hero and dragon._

_Scorpions weren’t dragons; and as seconds seemed to warp and flutter around him, he wondered if he was not a hero. The sting had been a mishap, one step or one stumble in the other direction and they wouldn’t have intersected amidst the tumble of debris. Heroes have a better sense for fate._

_Sabin was steady. His breath was slow and deliberate. A numbness crept through the vining lacework of his veins, and he imagined as it spread that he was turning to stone. If he could stand there solid even as the buckling supports gave way, it all would hold. The boy, the house, the general—he’d keep them aloft._

There was so much dust in the air around him as he leapt free that he thought for a moment the building had somehow combusted in addition to collapsing—that he was breathing in hot smoke and ash. He coughed and sputtered, leaning against what turned out to be a lamp post before the cloud of plaster parted on the crisp blue sky over Tzen.

Celes looked a fright, and the boy looked appropriately frightened. After the shouts, the salutations—after all the various other things one did when the dead returned to life, Sabin realized that they’d been ignoring the third party to their short adventure. The child clung to his mother’s arm as if he had been grafted there, and her grip on him was almost intense enough to still his shaking.

“Hey,” Sabin said as he approached. “Thank you so much for being brave!”

The child blinked up at him, silent.

“You did me a real solid keeping calm back there—if you hadn’t been so good at holding it together, I might have ended up a princely pancake.”

Celes couldn’t help but cackle when the boy finally spoke, offering his rescuer an imperiously condescending “You’re welcome.”

_“I’m sorry, Edgar. I’m so sorry.”_

_Celes felt she should say something more eloquent, more appropriate. The infinitude of sorrys she had at her disposal were as banal as they were useless._

_Edgar didn’t answer her, instead he walked down the dust-stained hall, stepping into a room that had gone a year without sunlight, its colors unfaded. The whip of his cape caused a once purple flower to scatter where it lay embalmed in its vase by the door._

_“I knew, you know,” he said, looking away from her. “They say such things are myths, but I knew.”_

_“Edgar…”_

_“If you set one clock always by another, you’d know when one was off—you’d know that you no longer kept time.” He sat down against the gold bright stone of a windowsill, holding a hand to his chest. Celes watched as his finger tapped what seemed a steady rhythm against his knee, until whatever beat he was trying to trace became lost within the thrum and whirl of the engines underpinning the castle walls._

_He shook his head, smiling nervously. “You’re sure, though? You’re certain... you couldn’t be mistaken?”_

_She shook her head even as his voice began to crack._

“You really thought _this_ was gonna fool somebody, then?” Sabin asked, holding “Gerad’s” cape up and squinting at its color. “I mean, it seems like the hair wasn’t really that necessary…”

“It did fool somebody,” Edgar said, towel wrapped about his head and googles over his eyes. “Disguise is a multi-layered art; the hair was a part of the whole package.”

“You didn’t even change the style.”

“Even I have my limits.”

“So you think it’ll change back, then?”

Edgar rubbed at the towel awkwardly before launching into a lengthy speech about how he knew the chemicals involved, how the only mildly toxic and almost entirely non-corrosive preparation would revert once exposed to the appropriate reagents, and how Sabin really ought better to appreciate his flair for theatrical detail.

After an hour, the towel came off, and Edgar gave everything a final rinse and a blow dry. He proceeded to sit in a lugubrious silence for the rest of the afternoon.

“It’s not that bad,” Sabin said as he came by around dinner, a half eaten turkey leg in hand.

“I’ll try again tomorrow.”

“Aw, I kinda like it! Imagine what Terra will think when we catch up to her!”

_He had remembered that Sabin had liked flowers. He’d liked a lot of things it was easy to like, and he’d liked them deeply: roasted walnuts, hot tea, animals at rest, children at play._

_He hadn’t known what to say when they told him; everything he’d thought to convey would have chafed him had it been said in the wake of his own troubles. He spoke as eloquently as he could to the king of Figaro and felt himself a noisome irritant throughout. He gave his sympathies to Lady Celes and asked if there was aught he could do. As he curled the paper tips of so many magenta stars into their proper form, he considered that it would have been a further imposition to ask what flowers it were that he’d liked._

_When they finally passed through Tzen and Cyan saw the great cairn of rubble, it did not seem as final as it ought. He imagined that the man might not still flip it over top him, toss it over his head, and emerge laughing. When he left the bouquet there in solitude, he was almost glad to see the wind immediately seize, scatter and carry it away._

Sabin had seen them before once, shadowy figures waving goodbye at the station. After that moment, he hadn’t asked. Then as now he felt clumsy, inarticulate. He was used to broad big movements, broad big feelings: he couldn’t well punch through a man’s misery. In this memory of a castle, he had to mind his own body when it came to stumbling over Cyan’s griefs. It seemed as though making the wrong move would shatter this fragile bubble that held them.

He mucked it up, of course. In the long halls of what had once been Doma’s capital, they heard the clatter of footsteps, and he must have thought to himself that ghosts don’t have feet. It happened to quickly to think it through. When the boy came barreling round the corner, laughing, Sabin knew already he was going to fall.

He ran to catch him. The child grinned up with a smile in want of its front teeth. Before he changed, before he grew heavy and turned into the shimmer and spiral of so much melting quicksilver in his grasp, Sabin made out what seemed the clear stamp of his friend’s two dark eyes peering at him in thanks.

_Cyan didn’t know what to do. Gau looked at the old man with a soft, disappointed expression, and it did not alter as he stepped out of the house. He fumed to think that anyone could have mistaken the boy as anything other than painfully human._

_“Father alive.” Gau looked off towards the endless plains._

_“Sir Gau, I am...”_

_“Somebody alive… even if not for Gau… somebody alive.”_

_Edgar turned pale as Cyan knelt beside the child, who had tumbled into the sunburnt grass and mud without a care for the clothing he’d been stuffed into. He fidgeted with overgrown weeds that covered the plot of his father’s wreck of a home, popping a triple cluster of black berries into his mouth._

_“Gau!” Cyan shouted. He knew the plant was inedible._

_“Poison not hurt Gau,” he said with a quiet defiance. “Eat a little every day. Get used to it.”_

_He closed his eyes, neck arcing like a bird making itself drink. Nobody spoke. Eventually Gau stood up, stretched at odd angles until the seams of a very expensive tailored suit tore, and held out a cluster to those around him._

_“Try.” He rubbed his eyes. “Try and you see.”_

It was a shame that they’d spent so much money at the tailor’s, because Sabin would have bought every piece of jerky in Jidoor if he could. He tried his best. After managing to convince the owners of the restaurant to readmit them (Edgar’s presence helped), he arranged for a private room and a spread that didn’t require much need for cutlery. Gau seemed a little baffled at being prompted to eat with an abandon he’d earlier been assured was discourteous, not knowing how disappointment often necessitated food and trumped courtesy.

After devouring two roast bustards, several platters of arcane hor’d’ouerves, and a bowl of fruit probably meant to be ornamental, Gau began to attack the salt cellar, evidently having learned—Sabin imagined—from the flocks of beasts that clustered around mineral deposits in the mountains.

“Hey—hey, watch it!” Sabin said, trying to make a grab for the bowl. “Too much of that could make you sick!”

Gau stopped, blinking up at him.

“Gau lost some earlier!” He laughed, using his lamentably befouled handkerchief to dab beneath his eyes. “Need more for later.”

Sabin sighed and smiled, dipping a finger in the salt himself. “I suppose we all do.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> **Image Credits (Incomplete, although everything that is not an alchemical symbol was explicitly listed as free for non-commercial use):** [USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Taxus_canadensis#/media/File:Taxus_canadensis_drawing.png) ([CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)); [_Trees and Shrubs: An abridgment of the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum_](https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/20596783230/) ([CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)); [_Cyclopedia of farm crops, a popular survey of crops and crop-making methods in the United States and Canada_](https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/20755059385) ([CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)); [_An introduction to zoology [microform] : for the use of high schools_](https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/20621400455/) ([CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)); _[Ornamental Shrubs of the United States](https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/20557317330/)_ ([CC0 1.0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)); _[Analytical Class-Book of Botany](https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/20174465143/)_ (No known copyright restrictions)
> 
> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.


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